The Ash Burner Read online

  For Anthony and Claire I’d said in plain words that Dad was a widower, and that I’d never really known my mother, but that I held on as dearly as I could to my barest memories of her. And I confided in them that my father would only ever love her. He’d never be able to put our earlier life in Whitby behind him. But although I was sure everyone knew this about him, I felt awkward when Dad visited next, as though I’d betrayed him again. I’d had a swimming accident, and now I was telling strangers about his heart.

  He didn’t notice. He approved of the Dickinson on my bedside table, and I felt this almost as an approval of Anthony and the confidences that were springing up between us. ‘You’re reading poetry at last,’ Dad said.

  ‘It’s my age,’ I replied.

  He wondered whether there was a girl to whom he could attribute the interest. ‘The nurses are pretty.’

  For a moment, I enjoyed his confusion, and a flicker of mischief that was rare between us. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They’ve been asking about you, too.’

  He smiled. ‘Then I should get out while I can.’

  I introduced him to Anthony. I was nervous, as though I were introducing a rival. Neither of them noticed that, either. They talked about the Dickinson, and the other North American poets that Dad liked.

  They got along well, which surprised me: my father didn’t take to people so quickly. And something else suddenly appeared. I saw it and understood it: a space between Dad and me that Anthony was walking into. While the two of them sat and talked – Anthony on the bed and my father in the chair beside it – I knew from then on that I’d relate best to my father when I was in the company of others. With Anthony, and also Claire.

  4

  Strangely, not everyone fell in love with Claire that summer. It seemed that there were scores of people in town, even those within our small, ocean-side parts of Lion’s Head and its skirt of estates, who could have watched her walk to Anthony’s bed as passively as they watched a stranger stroll from the surf club to the sea. She wasn’t one of the girls you heard boys talking about, included neither among the ones thought too beautiful to approach, nor those too approachable to be beautiful, in the way we imagined things should go. Perhaps it was because she was a boarder at her school, and less visible than the girls who came down to the beach in the afternoons. Or perhaps it was because, like Anthony, she was ever so slightly to the side of it all anyway.

  In the days that followed, the large bandage was finally replaced with a smaller one, and I was usually around when Claire made her visit. She always spoke with the directness of our first meeting – about the bandaging, where we lived, school. She wanted to know about Miss Weston, who’d once taught Anthony too, when he was still at primary school. Claire noticed that she was always leaving at around the time Dad arrived.

  ‘Do you mean, is Miss Weston trying to win over Dad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She still has to bring me books; she wants me to be ready for high school next year. But I think she leaves when she does because she’s stopped trying.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Claire said.

  She didn’t revisit the topic of my mother. All the same, that first conversation remained contained by the others, and animated her, I’m sure, on the day she decided that the three of us should break out of hospital. She said she wanted to show me something.

  Claire had been planning it: she unfolded two sets of Anthony’s clothes. I didn’t ask her how she’d got them. Apparently, it was self-evident that she would know how.

  I waited for her to speak. ‘Just put them on,’ she said.

  The children’s ward was on the ground floor. We could leave by the fire exit.

  ‘Let me try the door first,’ said Claire. ‘I’ll just say I leant on it if it goes off.’

  She pressed her side against a silver handle, and pushed the door open. The alarm didn’t go. In front of us a cement ramp wrapped the wall, back across the windows of the ward we were meant to be in.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Anthony.

  ‘I’ll tell you later. We have to get past this window.’ Claire, the one who didn’t need to hide, crouched under the window frame and shuffled to the other side.

  ‘I can’t crouch,’ I whispered across the bridge now formed between us. ‘The stitches.’

  And so Claire walked back. ‘Come with me,’ she said. We walked past the window, in our clothes two Anthonys trying to appear casual, expecting to see a quiet ward. I looked left. Half-a-dozen children were at the window, watching our every move.

  I waved at them. ‘I think we’re busted.’

  ‘Just keep walking,’ said Anthony, and we were gone.

  We crossed a hot car park, and a traffic island of brown grass and low palms. Waited for the traffic to clear. ‘Thank you for bringing me along,’ I said.

  Claire smiled in reply. ‘Just wait.’

  It was Saturday, market day. As we walked towards my school, the side of the road became more crowded with parked cars. We were shadowed by a slow convoy of people trying to find a parking spot.

  ‘Does your dad ever come?’ asked Claire.

  ‘No. He grows his own vegies.’

  ‘He’d like my father, then.’

  Anthony and I knew some of the same people, for my teachers were his old teachers. They asked him how high school was going, and looked at Claire in that way old teachers have, as though they’ve seen something they predicted years before. Anthony told me that he loved his English and art teachers, but that everyone else thought he was too argumentative.

  Claire said, ‘Anthony thinks people hate him, when all they want is for him to chill.’

  Anthony smiled. ‘It’s your day,’ he said to her. ‘Of course I’ll be chilled.’

  Her day, I now discovered, was the sudden appearance of Greece in the middle of the Saturday markets, and her parents’ stall of olives, tomatoes and citrus fruits.

  ‘This is Ted,’ Claire called over the market noise.

  ‘Hallo, Ted,’ her father called back. ‘I’m Nikolas. Claire’s mother is the one cutting up watermelon. Have some. Christina, bring over for the boys.’

  Christina’s temples shone with sweat. As she came over from the cutting table at the back, she glanced at Claire, an expression you’d have to be blind not to understand. You have two boys following you around now, it said. And we were just getting used to Anthony.

  She waited for Nikolas to do something, although I can’t think what there was to be done, even then. His response to Claire’s new admirer was simply to pretend that I wasn’t one – or that everyone was, and so it made no great difference. Claire ignored it all. She crossed to her parents’ side of the counter, and reached over it with the tray of watermelon for us to taste.

  ‘It’s delicious,’ she said, while her mother went back to the cutting table, as if accepting her daughter’s fate and her own defeat.

  ‘Leave some for our customers,’ Christina said to Claire.

  5

  When he was discharged from the hospital, Anthony left behind the Dickinson, whether I wanted it or not. Inside it, he’d transcribed words that were as oddly confidential as our first conversation had been. A line from one of the poems: The soul selects her own society.

  Three weeks after the accident, and a few days before Christmas, my father collected me from the hospital and we drove back to our side of Lion’s Head. He’d been kind to me in the hospital, but during the drive I felt something that he’d been waiting to express. His voice sounded sore – an extra strain in the wind.

  This built as we got nearer to home.

  I couldn’t face him then: I didn’t want to see his face. But this made him angrier. He didn’t speak until we got to the front steps, when he pressed me inside and towards my room. ‘Wait for me,’ he said.

  For an hour, I sat there, at the end of my bed. W
hen he came back, it was getting dark.

  He stood at the door. ‘You nearly died. Do you know that?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘Why would you be so damned stupid?’

  I had no explanation for that, and sat staring at the hands in my lap, hands that I always felt were such poor imitations against his. He left again, stomping down the hall to the kitchen and then making a big show of getting dinner ready, pulling the pans out heavily and knocking them against the cupboards. That was when I knew he’d forgiven me – when the anger had turned into a huff.

  He came back and told me that dinner was nearly ready. He added, ‘I’m sorry I’m so angry. Come and eat.’

  ‘It’s okay, Dad,’ I replied to his back as I followed it along the hall. He turned to me, and put his hand out for mine. I said, ‘It’s my fault. I’m sorry for swimming so far on my own.’

  ‘You frightened me. I thought you were too far out for me to help you.’

  ‘I know.’

  All of a sudden, we were both very hungry. He cooked perch in butter and garlic, and then served it with boiled potatoes. As always, on the side of his plate were lightly fried onions and tomatoes, and a wedge of bright yellow mustard.

  ‘It’s really good fish, Dad,’ I said, even though we had the same thing every second night.

  ‘Very fresh,’ he answered.

  I then asked him a question that I couldn’t usually have asked, I suppose as much as anything because it was a question that had gone unasked for so long: ‘How did Mum die?’

  He put down his cutlery. ‘She drowned,’ he said. He watched me nod. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘I heard someone talk about it.’

  This stopped him for a moment – the reminder that there was a life outside the house, one in which we were discussed and puzzled over. ‘Of course you’ve heard talk. That’s bad on my part. I’m sorry.’ He continued to himself, ‘Other people told you.’ He examined me. ‘Who did tell you?’

  This wasn’t the moment to tell Dad about my night swims. ‘I can’t remember,’ I said.

  ‘It was always hard to know the best time to talk to you about it.’

  ‘I know.’

  Again, he held my hand. Again, the lovely sensation of insignificance at feeling mine against his. ‘Your mother drowned,’ he repeated. ‘There. Does it help you understand why I’m angry? Why it frightened me?’

  ‘Yes.’ But I was surprised to hear him mention fear a second time.

  ‘Can you promise not to do that again, to swim out on your own like that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I wanted more fish. He hadn’t really cooked enough.

  ‘It’s a promise,’ he said.

  ‘I promise, Dad. I don’t want to swim anymore.’

  ‘Do you want something else to eat?’ he asked, seeing me watching his plate. He was a slow eater.

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ll put on some eggs, then,’ he said, and pushed himself from the table. ‘You’re not getting my fish.’ He was smiling at last. ‘Not after the hell you’ve put me through.’

  ‘How did it happen?’ I asked. ‘Did Mum get caught out?’

  He moved his coffee pot to the side and stood by the stove. ‘I’m not sure how it happened,’ he answered. His voice, like his hands, cupped a greater significance than mine. But he added a severe note, a reminder of what I’d promised: ‘Plenty of good swimmers drown. Your mum was one of those. She must have been unlucky.’

  I wondered why he wouldn’t say more. ‘She always swam? When she was a girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I remember her,’ I said. ‘I remember her dark hair. Her curls – thick, curly hair.’

  He walked back to the table with my plate. He’d cooked three eggs for me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t your mother. You’re remembering your aunt Lillie, my sister. She took care of you in those days, after your mother died.’

  I watched his face, waiting for more. Could I really have misremembered something like that?

  ‘Why don’t we have any pictures of Mum?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer straight away. For a while, I didn’t think he would. He finished his fish in silence, and by the time he was done I thought he was going to go back to the study to work, as he usually did after dinner. He stood up and walked that way. But then I heard him unlock a drawer in his desk, a sequence of sounds I’d heard before, other nights when I was meant to be asleep, and he came back with a slim envelope. From it, he drew a black-and-white photograph. He gave it to me carefully by the edges, against his palms, as one holds a record.

  The picture was the size of a postcard, with a white border. In it, a young woman and a child: my mother leaning against a stone wall that was dark against a white day, or perhaps the wash of overexposure. In the background, a faint outline of the entrance to Whitby harbour. Me sitting on the wall, and Mum’s arm around me, her hand across my shirt. She was wearing a cardigan, unbuttoned at the top; the dark collar of a white blouse showed underneath.

  ‘That’s her and me?’

  ‘Yes, that’s you and your mother. What do you think?’

  ‘I think she’s beautiful.’

  But not in the way I’d remembered. Dad was right. I’d been thinking of someone else, his sister Lillie. I followed his eyes, and for a moment tried to find myself not in the child on the wall, but in the gaze that my mother offered the camera. Had she looked at me in this way? What I saw most clearly was happiness. And my own happiness: that was the trace light that suddenly formed around my dim sense of her, and re-lit a memory of her movement around me, her hand against the back of my neck as we walked along a wet path.

  ‘Yes, your mother was beautiful,’ Dad said. ‘Almost too beautiful.’

  He’d said this before. But I didn’t know what it meant to be too beautiful. Spoken by my father, it sounded like a condition in law.

  ‘Did she always have straight hair?’ I asked.

  ‘Her hair was straight, yes. And very fine.’

  After he took the photograph back, he asked me to explain why I’d been swimming out so far. It was my chance to tell him that for over a year I’d known that she drowned, and that I thought that if I swam for long enough she might join me in the deep, on the seabed.

  But the idea of saying it out loud made it seem like such nonsense, not because I didn’t believe in it or because I didn’t think he’d understand, but because it would have meant explaining something that had for so long existed privately, as my side of the nights that we spent divided by his opera collection. We were both too shy for that.

  So, instead of answering his question, I said, ‘I wish she was still alive. I miss her.’

  ‘Me, too, Ted,’ he said, and let me off.

  That evening, he expanded on a fact I’d heard in the passing remarks of our neighbours. My mother, Isabel, had died when I was three, a year before we moved to Lion’s Head. Her death had prompted our migration to Australia. He said she was in Scarborough now – her ashes were kept in a town she’d loved during her childhood, a place of holidays and the seaside, but also close to Scarborough beach, where she’d drowned.

  Most of her family was from Durham, a university town a little inland from his and my birthplace, Whitby. He said hers had been a family of academics. His family’s background was in fishing. He was proud of this, but also of being the first to reach beyond a long history on the North Sea trawlers and into the path of someone like her. They were different: he was there to get ahead, while she often learnt things for their own sake, spending hours on her own.

  ‘Do you mean reading?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, she read a lot, hours and hours every day. Mostly by the river that runs through Durham – there’s so many places to sit there. That’s how I met her. I started talking to a beautiful girl who was sitting on her own, reading by th
e river. For some reason, I didn’t think anything of interrupting her.’

  ‘Did you fall in love that day?’

  ‘It was before then.’

  He was ready to stop, but I kept on. ‘What happened before then?’

  ‘We didn’t know each other, but we were in the same literature class. She had strong ideas, especially about books and what they might or might not be saying about the world. I didn’t. Or, I didn’t have as strong ideas as hers. I liked that about her. It suited the way she spoke, the way she spent all that time on her own sorting things out, like she was getting ready for something grand. Do you follow what I mean?’

  He was speaking more to himself than to me, and my understanding wasn’t really needed. But I nodded in agreement, so that he’d go on. ‘She seemed older than me, even though I was the older one, because she didn’t ever hold back, and already she knew so much more than I did. She was soaked in her parents’ knowledge. She didn’t realise it, but it was as clear as day to me.

  ‘I’m not sure how much I took in. She would talk about medieval romances, or the use of imagery in Sidney, or how Wordsworth might or might not have reclined before he put pen to paper. I didn’t care terribly much about these things, but I liked that they mattered to her, and I liked it that she was serious. It made her beautiful. That’s why I sat next to her on the bench that day.’ He joked with himself: ‘She needed interrupting by someone like me.’

  ‘I wish I’d known her.’

  ‘You did. You knew her.’ I wanted to hold him when he said that, but I didn’t want him to stop talking. ‘And she knew you. You were hers. You were her boy.’

  With that, he remembered again that he was meant to be talking to me. He said, ‘When she passed away, I felt very bad, very bad about losing her. Sometimes making a fresh start is the only chance you have in these situations. I decided not to spend forever trying to make sense of what we’d lost. I know it’s not the same for you. You need her, and I should give you more of her. Tell you more. But there was no point in coming out to Australia if we were going to spend our lives thinking of Whitby. That’s why I haven’t put the picture out.’